The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double

Abstract

Ian Munro's Th e Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: Th e City and Its Doubleis a wide-ranging and well-argued study of the complex relations among the city, the crowd, and the theatre in early modern London."What is the city but the people?" asks the tribune Sicinus in Coriolanus.Munro asks us to take this question seriously.Th e book's introduction and fi rst chapter outline his position in broad terms.Th e rapid population increase in early modern London, Munro argues, pushed England's capital city into a crisis in signifi cation or legibility.In texts like Elizabeth's 1580 building proclamation and Stow's Survey of London, royal and civic authorities sought nostalgically to preserve the idea of a London that was ordered, rational, and knowable.Th e swelling urban population, housed in new and labyrinthine tenements whose construction threatened to eff ace the symbolic stability of the city just as their occupants' riotous potential posed an ever-present threat to royal and civic hierarchies of authority, rendered such ideas of the city incoherent.In his approach to London as a symbolic construct, Munro links his work to such scholarly landmarks as Gail Kern Paster's Th e Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare and Lawrence Manley's Literature and Culture in Early Modern London.However, Munro is not just interested in the ideas (ideal or demonic) of the city, but also its physical bodies and spaces-in early modern London, ever more bodies in increasingly opaque spaces.Moreover, Munro conceptualizes the relationship between city and crowd in more sophisticated and productive terms than simple opposition.His primary conceptual model is that of deconstructive supplementarity: the space of the crowd is "a multivalent space that supplements the space of the city, disrupting, reinforcing, or otherwise transforming the social and symbolic dynamics of urban meaning."He also turns for conceptual models to Deleuze and Guatt ari's distinction between arborescent (hierarchically organized) and rhizomatic (heterogeneous and conglomerative) systems."In the context of London," Munro writes, "and particularly in the context of London's sporadic but persistent unrest, arborescent models of population are superseded by rhizomatic models: the urban Comptes rendus 139

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